Mrs. God (12 page)

That's my girl, Standish thought.

The young woman from Massachusetts spent her mornings writing in the Fountain Rooms, took lunch with E. and the other guests, and in the afternoon wandered through the Land—her name for Esswood. The physical world excited her nearly to euphoria. She felt that Esswood's beauty called to her, spoke to her, welcomed her. In the afternoon guests not busy writing played croquet, bathed in the pond, read by themselves in the library or the East Hall, or read to one another beneath sun umbrellas on the great terrace overlooking the pond and the far fields. Dinners were lavish: gourmet meals and great wines. The young woman declared a preference for loin of veal with morel sauce, and did not object when the Land teasingly offered it to her every night for a week. The wines too were ambrosial. On her first night the guests were given a 1900 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, and on the second night, an 1872 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild. On the third night the guests were given an 1862 Lafite-Rothschild, reputedly the greatest vintage of the past hundred years, and considered likely to surpass all other wines for the next hundred as well.

The young woman's euphoria was more substantial than that given by wine, more permanent than could be provided by good company, and more profound even than that found in artistic progress. The feelings the young woman began to associate with the Land were not overtly religious, but were intensely spiritual—a force like music or disembodied spirit seemed to inhabit every aspect of the estate. What was most remarkable about the web of feelings linked to the Land was its release of gaiety. Not naturally high-spirited, the young woman joined the other guests in play—charades and tableaux and laughing conversations.

The young woman found herself indulging a previously unsuspected taste for practical jokes: she used her “secret” corridor to move unseen about the house, and delighted in disarranging a fellow poet's papers or effects, and in appearing like a specter in their rooms at night, then vanishing.

Riveted to the pages before him, Standish felt his heart slam against his ribs.

Although she had never taken any great interest in children, the young woman felt that much of the Land's strange and tender appeal to her was due to her hostess's two surviving children.

Again, Standish's heart nearly stopped.

E.'s calm was all the more remarkable in the light of her children's fates. She had married a second cousin with the same surname, a man uninterested in either the arts or country life and far more devoted to French brandy, Italian women, and the House of Commons than to his family: yet he had given her five children, three of whom had died in their earliest years. The two living children, R. and M., endeared themselves to the Land's young guest by their quiet, sweet, rather stricken charm: they had little energy, for they too were supposed to have contracted the disease that had killed their siblings. This awful disease, it was rumored, had been transmitted to the children by their father, and was something of a family curse; a family secret, too, for the exact nature of the disease was not known.

Both children tired easily, and were often inordinately hungry—it was a symptom of the disease that to sustain even low levels of energy, the sufferer had to take in large quantities of food, though what sort of food remained a mystery. The children were always fed in private. Despite their special diet, little R. and little M. seemed to be wasting away before the young guest's eyes. The sister more so than her brother: while
he
could still appear to be something like a normal child,
she
was weaker by the day.
He
was pale;
she
was pallid, even waxen. At times the poor child's skin seemed damp and oddly ridged, or pocked, or swollen, or all three at once, and so white as to be almost translucent—as if she were in the process of changing into another kind of creature altogether.

Standish looked up and saw that the light in the library had grown rich and golden. His watch said that it was one-thirty. He was half an hour late for lunch. Numbly, he got to his feet.

He knew that he had not even begun to assimilate what he had read. He would have to understand what Isobel had written even more than Isobel had understood it. This seemed crucial: Standish had heard the music too, and he had experienced Isobel's euphoria the first time he had stepped out into the Land in daylight. But Isobel had taken everything at face value. The words
timeless, eternity, gaiety, children, disease, transformation
swirled through Standish's head.
Specter, laughter, disembodied spirit
.

An idea of the morning presented itself to him with even greater force, and he walked on complaining legs to the great door. When he opened it he saw an ignition key on the carpet.

After lunch, groggy from veal and wine, he opened Esswood's great front door and inhaled fragrant summer air. For an instant he pictured the two living children, little R. and little M., seated on the marble steps. Then he saw the car on the drive and gasped. It was a Ford Escort, painted turquoise.

Standish flew down the steps, noticing that the car was far cleaner than the one he had driven from Gatwick to Lincolnshire. He was sure that it was a different car. When he reached the drive he walked up to it and touched its warm, smooth, well-waxed hood. It
was
a different car. Like everything else that had been taken into the Land, it shone and sparkled.

Standish got in behind the wheel and fit the key into the ignition.

It took nearly an hour to find the local church. When Standish finally forced himself to stop and ask for directions, he found that he could scarcely penetrate the harsh, slow-moving local accent. Trying to make sense of the garble of lefts and rights given him by two grudging men outside a pub, Standish wound up on Beaswick's High Street, where teenagers stared at his car and mumbled remarks he did not have to understand to know were obscene. The town was gray and dirty. Overweight women with piled-up hair and flaming faces peered into the car. Then, as suddenly as slag heaps and flares had turned into thick forest, the ugly little sweetshops and tobacconists' became open fields and desolate marshes.

Eventually he saw a six-foot heap of grass and earth bristling with thick roots at an intersection and remembered that one of the hostile men before the pub had told him to turn one way or the other at a “hummock.” Perhaps this was a hummock. Far away stood a farmhouse. Two swaybacked horses stared gloomily at him from the middle distance. On the other side of the hummock a hill led up to a small gray church and a graveyard of tilting headstones. On the crest of the hill above the church stood a beehive-shaped windmill he had seen before. He was three minutes from Esswood: he could have walked across the field to get to the church.

Standish drove up onto the wet grass before the stone church and left the car to walk around to the graveyard.

On the other side of the church was a smaller, even uglier stone building like a cell with curtained windows. Standish walked between the two buildings to the cemetery gate.

Enclosed by a waist-high iron fence, the cemetery covered an acre of sloping ground and contained several hundred graves. The oldest headstones, those directly before Standish, resembled wrinkled old faces, sunken and blurred beneath a pattern of shadows and scratches. Standish began to move down the middle of the graveyard. None of the stones bore the name Seneschal. Other names recurred again and again—Totsworth, Beckley, Sedge, Cooper, Titterington. He kept moving slowly through the cemetery.

A door slammed behind him, and someone began working toward him through the graves. Standish turned around to see a black-haired man in a long, buttoned cassock approaching with one hand upraised, as if to stop traffic. The vicar's heavy red face sagged as if against a strong wind, and he leaned forward, ducking his head, as he hurried toward Standish.

“I say, I say.”

Standish waited for the man to reach him.

Close up, the vicar presented a hearty smiling manner that seemed a disguise for some other, more bullying quality. He was in his late fifties. The odors of beer and tobacco enveloped Standish as the man came nearer. He spoke in the harsh accent of the village. “Saw you from the vicarage, you know. Don't get many strangers here, don't get accustomed to strangers' faces.” A big yellow smile in the red face, as if to balance what might otherwise have been simple rudeness. “American, are you? Your clothes.”

Standish nodded.

“Interested in our Norman church? You'd be welcome to a walk round inside, but it makes me a bit uncomfortable to see a man I don't know walking about our little, um, our little garden of souls here. Seems irregular.”

“Why?”

The vicar blinked, then showed Standish his false smile. “You might think our ways are odd, but we are just a tiny little bit of a community, you know. Just paused on your way through, did you?”

“No.” The vicar irritated Standish so profoundly that he could scarcely bring himself to talk to the man.

“Came all this way to do grave rubbings. We've nothing to interest you in that line, sir.”

Standish frowned at the vicar. “I wanted to see if I could locate any family graves. My name is Sedge, and my people came from this village.”

“Ah. Well, now. You're a Sedge then, are you?” The vicar was squinting at him, half-smiling, as if trying to make out a family resemblance. “Where did you say you were from in America?”

“Massachusetts,” Standish said. “Duxbury, Massachusetts.”

“You should find Sedges right the way through this little cemetery. When did your people arrive in America, then?”

“Around eighteen fifty, maybe a bit earlier,” Standish said. “I traced us back right here to Beaswick, and a local family invited me to stay with them, so I wanted to see if I could find any of their people here too. I'm curious about them.”

He turned away from the vicar and began inspecting headstones again. Capt. Thomas Hopewell, 1870–1898. An angel leaned weeping back from an open book. A marble woman shrank back from grief or death, her face over her hands—he recognized the statue as the twin of one at Esswood. Behind him he felt, with senses suddenly magnified, the exasperation of the vicar. He waited for the man to come thundering after him, and then realized that the vicar's manner was that of a man with a secret.

The soft heavy tread came up behind him. “Local family, is it? Might I ask which local family?”

“Of course.” Standish stopped moving and turned around to the sagging red face. Behind the vicar he caught a glimpse of a marble monument atop a child's grave—a small boy reaching up with outstretched arms. This too was a copy of a statue in Esswood's “secret” corridor. “The Seneschals.”

The vicar actually licked his lips. His entire manner had changed in a moment, along with the atmosphere between himself and Standish. “That's really very interesting, that is.”

“Good.” Standish turned away to inspect the name on the base of the monument of the grieving woman.
SODDEN
. He fought the impulse to giggle. “Where are they buried, then?”

“Prominent family, of course.” The vicar scuttled up beside him. “You'd say,
the
prominent family in our little corner of the world. You're putting up with them, are you, Mr. Sedge? In Esswood House?”

“That's right.”

“Quiet over there, is it, Mr. Sedge?”

“Yes, it's very peaceful,” Standish said.

“I daresay.” The man licked his lips again. Standish was startled by the sudden realization that the vicar looked frightened.

“I think it's strange that I don't see any of their graves. Edith's children, I mean—the three who died so young.”

“Strange? I should think it is strange. And what about Edith herself? Miss Edith Seneschal, who became Mrs. Edith Seneschal, now surely you would think she would be buried here as well. Wouldn't you, Mr. Sedge?”

The man was peering at him with his head cocked and his lips pursed. Rusty brown stains like stripes covered his cassock.

“And her husband too, don't you think? The Honorable Arthur Seneschal, a dim figure granted, a willing partner one might say, very willing I'd wager, in all his wife's ambitions, you'll be wanting to see his headstone as well, won't you?” There was a venomous lilt in his voice, and Standish had the feeling of some unspoken complicity between them.

“What's wrong with you?” he said.

“He wonders what's wrong with me,” the vicar said to the air. “Mr. Sedge is curious, isn't he? The odd fact is, there hasn't been a Sedge in Beaswick since seventeen—what was it now?” He darted over the low grass to a tilting headstone. “Seventeen eighty-nine, I thought it was that. Charles Sedge. A bachelor, by the way. An only son. He'd be amused by your story. He'd be especially amused that you claim to be staying with the Seneschals.” The vicar astonished Standish by leaning over the tombstone and braying: “This fellow claims to be a Sedge—long-lost American cousin, Charles! Wants to pay his respects. Says he's putting up at Esswood House. Wants to find the graves of Edith's children. Can you give him any assistance, Charles?”

He straightened up. An unhealthy mirth had turned his face an ever darker shade of red. “Or perhaps I heard the name wrong? Did you want to say that your name is Titterington? Or Cooper? You couldn't be a Beaswick Sedge, in any case, could you? They were all dead by the time you claim your family arrived in America. And no descendant of a Beaswick Sedge would walk through the doors of Esswood House.”

Standish said, “I don't know what you're talking about. Are you accusing me of lying?”

“I'm accusing you of ignorance,” the vicar said. “I wonder where you really are staying. I wonder where you really are from. If you don't know that we would refuse to give burial to any Seneschal, you have no connection to Beaswick. Which makes me wonder what it is that you are doing in my churchyard, telling me tales about staying at Esswood House.”